– Guest Post by Thomas Freese, PhD

After nearly 25 years of loving and living with someone who struggles with the issue of invisibility, I have experienced the pain and the joy of seeing him struggle with (and increasingly succeed in) truly being present in the world. The rewards of this journey have been great, if at times painful. My own process has been to try to understand and be supportive of the journey of someone who has difficulty expressing the challenges that he faces. I recently gained a new perspective from an unexpected source.

I reread one of my favorite books, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. This book is a tragic allegory of the human condition told through the experience of a carnival family whose parents set out to purposely “breed their own exhibit of human oddities” (back cover). This novel has long been a favorite and, having just completed my third reading, I have realized why. The human condition being dealt with is invisibility.

The central character of the story is Arturo, also known as Aquaboy. He has flippers in place of arms and legs, and began life performing tricks in a large water tank for carnival patrons. As he enters adulthood, he discovers that he has incredible powers of perception and persuasion. He is able to see the secrets that people hope will never be revealed and to help bring out the shame associated with them. In one of the first incidents, he calls an extremely obese woman out of the audience and asks her if she thought she would be happy if she were beautiful, or “is it people not loving you that makes you unhappy? If they don’t love you it’s because there’s something wrong with you. If they love you then it must mean that you are all right” (p. 178). The woman feels understood for the first time and joins the carnival to be near Arturo.

Arturo’s ability to see into the invisible parts of people soon attracts crowds of hundreds to all of his shows and hundreds of cult followers who begin to travel with the show. Arturo’s ability to see and draw out the secret, invisible pieces of people is phenomenal; however, he does not use this gift for good. Instead, he convinces his cult followers that if they were more like him (i.e., less normal), they would be happier. His followers therefore voluntarily submit to removing their limbs, slowly, through repetitive surgeries, piece by piece. In doing this-removing their normalcy-they are gradually amputating their inner sources of shame.

I won’t give away the end of the book. While it is truly tragic, it is brilliantly crafted and should be read in the author’s own words. The message that leapt from the page came long before the end: living invisibly causes people to amputate important and beautiful pieces of themselves. They learn to live without these pieces and continually try to appear normal and well functioning without them. However, as with Arturo’s cult followers, they have more and more difficulty as they are drawn to remove more and more important pieces.

In what ways have you cut off pieces of yourself? What has this removal cost? What would it be like if those cut off pieces no longer had the power to shame?

The painful process of identifying these secret sources of inner shame, claiming them, and then re-attaching them in a way that they lose their shaming force and become sources of power is a long one-but the rewards are beyond measure.

Write a comment